Ramblings about myself...

Design...

K I S S : Keep It Simple, Stupid

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.

That said, it has been my relentless effort to achieve as much simplicity in everything I work on as possible: be it website, complex software or even tangle of real-life relationship. I wouldn't claim I have been successful all the times, but the results have rarely disappointed me. I'm getting better as I keep practicing and by being constantly aware of this singular aim.

And it is my aim to prove the same thing by apparently minimalistic design of my website. I think the website is rich in content and yet is not unwieldy to navigate or overly crowded.

Inspiration behind the design of this website

Web page navigation is the most crucial (and often neglected) component of any web site. Traditionally navigation comes in the form of list, which is typically in the form of a vertical list on the left-hand side of the web page. The most important factor for this is that theoretically there is infinite amount of vertical space available to the developer. Vertical scrolling is well accepted by users so building a vertical list makes sense. A horizontal list might require the user to scroll horizontally, something that doesn't come to them naturally.

Vertical navigation could wind up consuming nearly one-fourth of vertical space. This is bad. Why? The content is spread out vertically. Now the user has to scroll a lot. Usability of website comes down from "typical" to "annoying".

How can we fix this? Simple, get rid of the vertical navigation element!

How? Well think of Windows, specifically the start button. One button to access all the content on your computer. Absolutely fantastic! And that's what I'm doing here. The key is the horizontal menu up above. It should be limited to no more than 5 or 6 menu items. None of the items should be very long in length. The long, complex menu items should come underneath as a drop-down menu.

Later part of explanation adopted from 'Purpose of Layout' on Ruthsarian Layouts.